High-resolution genome analysis techniques are now being used in international cancer genome analysis efforts to catalog aberrations driving the pathophysiology of nearly all major cancer types. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA, ) project and the International Cancer Genome Consortium…
Introduction to Next-Generation Sequencing Current DNA sequencing methods differ dramatically from a mere 7 years ago, when next-generation sequencing (NGS) instrumentation was first introduced. Indeed, the science of DNA sequencing is only 35 years old, and its companion discipline known…
Biomarkers of early cancer detection, specific markers of a malignancy type, and predictive markers of response to treatment will aid in the early diagnosis and selection of the most efficient therapies. An exponential growth in technologies has been achieved toward…
Cancer is a complex disease involving both environmental and genetic determinants. The majority of cancers are caused by environmental and lifestyle factors, including smoking, alcohol use, infectious agents, occupation, diet, obesity, and lack of physical activity. However, only a small…
Over the past decade, complementary and at times antithetic views of tumor initiation and progression have emerged, often based on the introduction of novel high-throughput technologies for the characterization of the cell’s genetic and epigenetic landscape. On the one hand,…
Introduction Adult tissues contain a multitude of cell types that are spatially and functionally coordinated to regulate normal tissue homeostasis. When a tissue becomes injured, for example, from a skin wound, there is a surge of infiltrating cell types and…
In the written history of medicine, neoplasms have been diagnosed for nearly 4000 years. Almost from the beginning, medical practitioners recognized that the most life-threatening attribute of neoplastic cells is the ability to disseminate and colonize distant tissues. When tumors…
Solid tumors require a vascular system to grow beyond about 2 mm in diameter, a size at which diffusion of oxygen and nutrients is limiting. The establishment of a tumor vasculature through the process of angiogenesis overcomes these limitations, while…
Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to Ms. Negest Williams for unparalleled administrative support. The discovery in the 1970s of proto-oncogenes, genes that become oncogenic (“cancer causing”) either through genetic modifications or increased expression, and tumor suppressor genes, those that if…
The term senescence was coined more than 50 years ago to describe the loss of replicative capacity of normal human diploid cells in culture. At that time, senescence was proposed to generally reflect the process of cellular aging. Early studies…